It's been widely reported and that makes it fact-esque. - Stephen Colbert

As we are all now well aware, there is a split in the nation's system of law and morality: if you're a conservative Republican , committing fraud is a standard business practice and adultery is justified by your patriotism; if, otoh, you're a liberal Democrat, playing golf is tantamount to treason and visiting foreign countries, however briefly, makes you a terrorist.

[T]he Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, which has long sought to position itself squarely in the evangelical mainstream, promoted Christian rap artist Tedashii as well a song from Tedashii's new album--with lyrics declaring that Christians should be as dedicated as suicide bombers.

"Now we gotta start making WAR. Now we can start saying NO to the fleshly impulses that Jesus was paying for. Now we can start taking the lead, just like the Dalai Llama, and start going all out, just like a suicide bomber." - from Christian rap artist Tedashii's song Make War

Given that some soldiers now training at Bragg may be one day be killed by suicide bombers, the BGAE's promotion of Tedashii's song Make War seems especially striking.

Uh, yeah....

This is disturbing on two fronts, first for itself and second for its source. Graham's group used to be a MOR, centrist evangelical organization not given to the extremes of the religious far right. It would seem that even they have begun to kowtow to the militarist Xtianist nonsense of the LeHaye/Rapture wing of fruitcakes. The far right looooves it some war, especially when it can be fought through innocent 3rd parties and poor kids who would otherwise be swelling the ranks of discontented unemployed and sucking up welfare money that should by rights be going into bankers' stock portfolios, so it is profoundly worrying that they're gearing up to play "Xtian jihadist" as if it was an Xbox game.

Even worse is the assumption that their terrorism would be godly and justified whereas if Muslims do it, it is Satanic and disgusting. It means that this whole "Law and morality doesn't have to be consistent or fair, they just have to be on my side" thingy that conservatives have been pushing for 3 decades has finally begun to reach into every avenue of their lives and thought (if you can call what they do "thinking"). They now believe that even the most horrendous of acts is OK if they do it.

We've been saying for some time that this was all going to get very ugly. It just did.

A law under consideration in South Dakota would expand the definition of "justifiable homicide" to include killings that are intended to prevent harm to a fetus-a move that could make it legal to kill doctors who perform abortions. The Republican-backed legislation, House Bill 1171, has passed out of committee on a nine-to-three party-line vote, and is expected to face a floor vote in the state's GOP-dominated House of Representatives soon.

But this, one may say, is only the beginning. American eliminationists have long been searching for a way to get rid of anybody who doesn't fit their ideal image: white, rich, preferably male, and very very conservative. The answer that S Dak has just put forward solves the problem of legal eliminationism, which it hasn't been - legal, that is - up to now. Murder has never been acceptable and genocide has been an ugly word ever since Hitler, so the problem has been how to frame the mass murder of non-conservatives in a legally acceptable way. S Dak's "protectionist" framing solves this problem by neatly dove-tailing into the protectionist framing that justifies the Second Iraq War, the destruction of civil liberties since 9/11, and the looting of the economy by Wall Street.

Reprinted from 12.24.06 – And it will continue to be printed every year until the O’Reilly-originated “War on Christmas” BS ends. There’s no antidote to lies except truth.

This would be the time, if ever there was one, to reflect on the meaning of Christmas, but before we can do that to any purpose we need to clear away some of the dead wood by exploding a couple of the myths that have built up around it since the holiday became popular in the late 19th century. Chief among these is the legend that Christmas is Christian, or even religious.

sim'-pli-cis-m: (n) The belief that the answers to all problems, no matter how complex they may seem, are easy to understand and uncomplicated by nuance or ambiguity.

It has become part of the left-wing's conventional wisdom that Tea Partiers are crushingly stoopid (TBogg calls them "Teatards"). While this viewpoint is not, on the surface, without its merits, I don't believe it's that easy to explain. I don't think most of the people in the video below are so much dumb as ignorant and, in true American tradition, intellectually lazy.

The difference between "stupid" and "ignorant" is one of ability and will. The stupid cannot understand no matter how much information they have, the ignorant can but only if they have enough information for a reasonable analysis, and that requires both the will to search out the pieces and an intellectual work ethic of sufficient strength to connect the dots once the info is in hand.

Not that it would take that much intellectual strength. In most cases an amount of intellectual energy equal to that put out by an 8th-grader writing a short report on a subject about which she cares not a whit would be all that was necessary. Given that the information required to solve our worst problems ought to be a good deal more important to the average citizen than a report on Ecuadorian flax production, one would think most of us would be willing to spend the small amount of time it would take.

OK, so there's not much question that the Catholic Church is currently in the hands of the kind of Pope the Borgias would have understood and approved. Is there likewise any question that the church Ratzinger runs is a hierarchy with a top-down political structure similar to the Mafia's?

Phoenix's Bishop Tom Olmsted doesn't think so. He is clearly aware what stance he'd better take on issues if he wants to get the attention of the Don and make his way up the ladder in the Family. This week he excommunicated a nun charged with administering a Catholic hospital. Was she stealing money? Holding Satanic rites in the operating rooms? No. She OK'ed an abortion in order to save the life of a pregnant woman who was critically ill.

Never let it be said that we are prejudiced only against white crackers, wingnuts, and right-wing religious crackpots. In a spirit of bipartisanship and equality, we state categorically that we are also prejudiced against black, brown, and/or polka-dot crackers, wingnuts, and religious crackpots. Like, say, Kimberly Daniels. (Via SN) A black "minister", Ms Daniels affects to believe a lot of - I think it's safe to say - odd things about Halloween. Like that it's a holiday (it isn't) and that Halloween candy carries curses.

I hate to say the same things over and over again but I often don't have much choice: Obama isn't all that different from Bush and it isn't just civil rights or his obeisance to Wall Street. Sarah Posner writes in The Nation that he has just appointed Alexia Kelley, executive director of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good (CACG), to lead the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Kelley isn't exactly a wingnut but she is anti-abortion in a job that requires her to be objective at the very least. (Via T2A)

I don't bother to write much about Sarah Palin because she's a twit and me writing about Palin would be a little like Dostoyevski writing a 1000 page novel about lima beans.

But every once in a while the response to Palin is so egregiously stoopid that it's worth pointing out because it's a sign that we still don't understand what's happened to the Right, especially the GOP. Case in point, Steve Benen, writing about Palin's political self-immolation, writes what has to be one of the Top Five Dumbest Sentences he's ever written. (Via Norwegianity)

There's simply no logic to this strategy.

Steve, sweetie, since when does "logic" have any connection whatever to conservative, especially ultraconservative, thinking? For that matter, what has thinking got to do with it? Hasn't the last 10 years taught you anything at all?

It isn't bad enough that Texas, in the form of the Texas GOP Platform, gave us wars, famine, pestilence, and a global economy it broke into thousands of little pieces. It wasn't enough that it shoved George W Bush, Iraq, torture, unprecedented corporate corruption, the egregious executions of innocent men, and the likes of Tom DeLay and John Cornyn down our throats. No, now it wants to force creationism into our schools by forcing it into Texas textbooks.

Is there no end to Texan perfidy? Why can't they leave the rest of us alone?

Bang for the Buck: Boosting the American Economy

Compassionate Conservatism in Action

Molly

"We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war."

Zinn

"[O]ur time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice."

Bono

"True religion will not let us fall asleep in the comfort of our freedom. Love thy neighbor is not a piece of advice, it's a command. ...

God, my friends, is with the poor and God is with us, if we are with them. This is not a burden, this is an adventure."

The Reverend Al Sharpton

Ray wasn't singing about what he knew, 'cause Ray had been blind since he was a child. He hadn't seen many purple mountains. He hadn't seen many fruited plains. He was singing about what he believed to be.

Mr. President, we love America, not because of all of us have seen the beauty all the time.

But we believed if we kept on working, if we kept on marching, if we kept on voting, if we kept on believing, we would make America beautiful for everybody.

Marx

''With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 percent will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 percent will produce eagerness, 50 percent positive audacity; 100 percent will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 percent, and there is not a crime which it will not scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged.''